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Guest
Guest
I recently upgraded my MSI K7T Turbo Raid with overclocked Duron to an ECS board with the SiS 735, Athlon 1.4 and 256 Mb Apacer DDR CAS 2.
First impression: this system is FAST.. and almost completely issue-less. What a relief when compared to my previous VIA experience. Just about everything worked right away, without even installing any driver/patch (except for the onboard sound obviously). It has been running Set@home and 3D Mark constantly for a few days, without any stability issues to date. Installed win2K and XP 2505, and it was really smooth sailing. I have had the board for a week now, and I’m still waiting for my first crash / illegal operation under either win2K or XP beta. Also, when I look at the event log in w2K its as clean as it gets. With my VIA board it was all yellow and red exclamation marks, no matter what I tried. Even a clean install would give me loads of error messages.
A few things could be improved though, and maybe someone could help me here:
1) IDE performance really is below par. I downloaded and installed the latest IDE driver I could find (dated april 2001), but I still get only 50%of the performance I should get with my harddisk (Maxtor 20 Gb 7200 ATA100 running UDMA 5). This happens under both win2K and XP build 2505. I noticed other users are having the same problem, so I guess I’ll have to wait for SiS to bring out an updated IDE driver ?
2) ACPI standby doesn’t work under XP. Not sure whether the mb is to blame but I got an error in the event log that ACPI bios something tried to write into a protected memory space. Considering this is an early XP beta, I presume this will be resolved with a later release. In win2K it works just fine. As does hibernation and USB beyond 133 fsb and just about anything that didn’t work with as it should with my VIA board.
The ECS is a no-frills motherboard. I knew that, and prefer stability and speed over thousands of tweaking options; however I would have liked to see multiplier and voltage adjustment in BIOS. Especially since the board is rather generous by supplying my Athlon with 1.82v, running it even hotter than it would anyway.
If the IDE performance gets sorted out, I really recommend this board. Especially when you consider the price: less than half what the MSI K7T Turbo non-raid costs currently !! You could even buy an additional PCI IDE adaptor, and still have a cheaper setup that performs better and so far seems much more stable. Im really impressed. The loss of the onboard RAID isn’t too bad either, as I’ll be setting up a software RAID one of these days..
One word on cpu temperature. I know this is a “hot” topic, and heavily debated. I just want to share you my experience: yes, my 1.4 does run hot. 50 idle, 59° under full load. That’s with a Silverado Noisecontrol at 10v , and with 2 case fans and 1 psu fan all running at 6v wires (3 more fans, case, harddisk and GPU are monitored and controlled by a DigiDoc5, im fanatic about keeping noise low). I know 59 isnt good. However, I tried too see how far it would go before becoming unstable, so I disconnected all case fans, and hook my Silverado to a 8v and even 6v wire. Well, I got it as high as 70°c while still being completely stable. So Im not worried at 59.
---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip
First impression: this system is FAST.. and almost completely issue-less. What a relief when compared to my previous VIA experience. Just about everything worked right away, without even installing any driver/patch (except for the onboard sound obviously). It has been running Set@home and 3D Mark constantly for a few days, without any stability issues to date. Installed win2K and XP 2505, and it was really smooth sailing. I have had the board for a week now, and I’m still waiting for my first crash / illegal operation under either win2K or XP beta. Also, when I look at the event log in w2K its as clean as it gets. With my VIA board it was all yellow and red exclamation marks, no matter what I tried. Even a clean install would give me loads of error messages.
A few things could be improved though, and maybe someone could help me here:
1) IDE performance really is below par. I downloaded and installed the latest IDE driver I could find (dated april 2001), but I still get only 50%of the performance I should get with my harddisk (Maxtor 20 Gb 7200 ATA100 running UDMA 5). This happens under both win2K and XP build 2505. I noticed other users are having the same problem, so I guess I’ll have to wait for SiS to bring out an updated IDE driver ?
2) ACPI standby doesn’t work under XP. Not sure whether the mb is to blame but I got an error in the event log that ACPI bios something tried to write into a protected memory space. Considering this is an early XP beta, I presume this will be resolved with a later release. In win2K it works just fine. As does hibernation and USB beyond 133 fsb and just about anything that didn’t work with as it should with my VIA board.
The ECS is a no-frills motherboard. I knew that, and prefer stability and speed over thousands of tweaking options; however I would have liked to see multiplier and voltage adjustment in BIOS. Especially since the board is rather generous by supplying my Athlon with 1.82v, running it even hotter than it would anyway.
If the IDE performance gets sorted out, I really recommend this board. Especially when you consider the price: less than half what the MSI K7T Turbo non-raid costs currently !! You could even buy an additional PCI IDE adaptor, and still have a cheaper setup that performs better and so far seems much more stable. Im really impressed. The loss of the onboard RAID isn’t too bad either, as I’ll be setting up a software RAID one of these days..
One word on cpu temperature. I know this is a “hot” topic, and heavily debated. I just want to share you my experience: yes, my 1.4 does run hot. 50 idle, 59° under full load. That’s with a Silverado Noisecontrol at 10v , and with 2 case fans and 1 psu fan all running at 6v wires (3 more fans, case, harddisk and GPU are monitored and controlled by a DigiDoc5, im fanatic about keeping noise low). I know 59 isnt good. However, I tried too see how far it would go before becoming unstable, so I disconnected all case fans, and hook my Silverado to a 8v and even 6v wire. Well, I got it as high as 70°c while still being completely stable. So Im not worried at 59.
---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip